Saturday, 27 September 2014

This post: treats from the eras of the Second, Third, Seventh,
and Eighth Doctors.

Due to the incredible lifetime type length of the School Summer Holidays, I was majorly impinged upon with my reading! There was much more child talking,child painting, TV watching and picnicking, out and abouting...general gallivanting and intermittent merriment/tantrums...much more of that than of the seriously fun business of getting down to my Who Reada/Listena-thon. So: there are NO Targets this time round, partially because I am still in the middle of some but not finished yet; and also partially because little hands really like them and kept nicking them off me: both pretending to read them but also making train tunnels of them (grrrrrrrr). So there's one Big Finish play, three novels and a few short stories. I've reviewed the short stories singly because I didn't buy the collection (only the one's I wanted) for the 50th Anniversary ones, and the other range, the Time Trips, just seem to pop up singly as and when. So again, I just pick the ones I want. (When I'm back to the Decalogs or the Big Finish Short Trips short story collections I will be reviewing them as whole books, as that'll be how I'm reading them.) So, sorry if any of you feel short changed this post by the lack of Targets, and the prevalence of single short stories - but thats how it panned out this Summer Holidays, with the lack of time. More Targets and longer books, next post. Meanwhile...

A note on order, for every post in this series.Target Originals are not read in order of publication (which was all
over the place), but in order of each Doctor, and each Doctor is read in order
of their stories broadcast on TV.However, I jump about in terms of which Doctor I read at any given
time.The Virgin New Adventures for
Sylvester will be read in order; as will the BBC 8th Doctor series
(as though they had been on TV, see?I’m
trying to get an arc flavour).The BBC
Past Doctors series and the Virgin Missing Adventures are simply read in terms
of which one I fancy next, as they are stand alone adventures slotting
in-between the TV ones.

Oh, and in case you
forgot, I’ve taken to recording which books I read that are actual paper
copies, and which are Kindle or other electronic.I’m being social historical for my own
benefit. I want to see how long it is before I just plug books straight into my
brain, how many years before I’m a reading cyborg.

As always with these rambly reviews: OFTEN
LARGE SPOILERS ON ALL BOOKS IMMINENT!!!!

Doctor Who: Invasion of the Cat People,
by Gary Russell (Virgin Missing Adventures)
(2nd Doctor.I really enjoyed this one.I read some reviews on Amazon, after I’d
finished, that said the plot was complicated or incoherent –I found it
anything but.Two groups of aliens
on Earth, one here an awful long time, one called by the other as a means
to escape…One are the race that sing things into existence [yes, the
Aboriginal Dreamlines do feature strongly here], and the others are the
Cat People of the title.They
aren’t the Cheetah People from Survival,
but a relative.The title is a bit
inaccurate – they aren’t really the focus of the book.

The plot made perfect sense to me – one group of aliens will do anything
to leave Earth; one group will try and save Earth as they like it
here.The Cat People simply want to
take what they can, destroy what remains and leave – do what they always
do.Its up to the second Doctor,
Polly and Ben to try and correct matters.There’s some lovely writing and lovely concepts in this book, as
well as some delicious stuff about hauntings and EX rooms [atmospherically
sealed], but what I loved about it the most was that it bounced along,
full of goodnatured energy – even when sinister things were happening [and
there’s some nastiness], it doesn’t have that dreadful bleakness that
scifi can sink into.

Also, Polly gets a starring role as the companion with most to do.Not more than the Doctor, but she’s
important – her part is an interesting one.Don’t want to spoiler it all, so I’ll
stop, but this was a great and fun read. ACTUAL BOOK.)

Doctor Who: Last of the Gadarene, by
Mark Gatiss(BBC Past Doctors series)(3rd Doctor.I was
really in 2 minds about this one.It started off really well, a marvellous evocation of the 3rd
Doctors self, period and place.Not
a hair wrong with the ventriloquism of the period, clearly loved by the
author and thoroughly absorbed.The
set up of the story was wonderful: a small village, a Wing Commander, aged
and yet still brave and gutsy – a character to love and root for in all
difficulties.The strange lorries
bringing shiny coffin like metal caskets, ruining the grass.The old aerodrome as a new airport, but
bringing who and what to Earth?It
was a lovely set up, and I ate three quarters of the book in quick order
before realising I was a bit uncomfortable.

What I was uncomfortable with was the main villain woman and her stretched
and hideous smile, constantly mentioned; her greasy hair.I was also a bit intermittently
uncomfortable with the way Mark Gatiss structures his sentences, but
that’s purely a matter of personal opinion, and his are constructed with
more regard to rules than mine, for sure, so I won’t press that.No…it was that the story was pure old
lovely classic Who.And the villain
lady was pure new Who: new Who seems to have spawned quite a lot of very
oddly similar female villains – all a bit Miss Jones’-ish: glasses, fifties
type suit with cinched in waist, court heels, hair in relentlessly coiffed
up-do; and an amazing case of posh and superior sibilant Englishness.I can think of several episodes where
these sorts of women appear [e.g. Partners
in Crime], right up to the latest series with Capaldi [Time Heist]…and here was another
one in a very close mould.When
villains are at all clichéd or overly signalled [the way in an American
series you can tell if someone has ‘gone bad’ because suddenly they start
wearing a lot of black and if they are men they don’t shave so much – and
either sex suddenly wears lots of leather]: I get bored.The characterisation does nothing for
me.

Saying that, the creepy wide grin that she had, plus the way all the villagers
started to get it too once infected by the baby forms of the parasites [the
Gaderene of the title], was an incredibly scary image and idea.It was as grotesque and in keeping with
the era as the horrible gentlemen costumes and masks in Terror of the Autons.I just didn’t quite like it.There was something too childlike about
it, despite its almost grown up horror feel.The book had a foot in both camps and I
wasn’t sure exactly where I was landing.

Nonetheless, those 2 weird points are my only concern:I loved the portrayal of the Doctor and
Jo; Benton and the Brigadier were lovingly done – though not enough of
Yates!The subsidiary characters,
especially Noah, who was very resourceful, were a pleasure to read.And getting the Doctor to fly a spitfire
was inspired, as it’s just the sort of thing Pertwee’s Doctor would
do!ACTUAL BOOK.)

Doctor Who: The Ripple Effect,
by Malorie Blackman (BBC 50th Anniversary e-Short Story
Collection)
(7th Doctor.The Doctor
and Ace are stuck in Temporal Plexus [don’t you love Who jargon?!];
marooned in a sort of time fog, for 8 days so far.Surrounding them are the debris of many
other wrecks, hundreds of other trapped ships whose inhabitants eventually
died.The Doctor gets the desperate
and odd idea that blowing up the nearest star is the only way to generate
enough energy to free them from the Plexus.He does; it works.

They appear to have landed on Skaro – where Timelords, other races and
daleks live together peacefully.But
Skaro is destroyed, how can it be?According
to all computers and info sources that are not the TARDIS databanks,
throughout the universe, daleks are loveable civilised peaceful beings:
their planet a beacon of knowledge and study, just like Ancient Greece.

While the Doctor and Ace were in the Plexus, a Ripple Effect happened,
leaving them the only people in the universe who can remember the daleks
previous behaviour and the genocides they have done.Of course, the event was caused by the
Doctor blowing up the star; so he has to retrace his footsteps and get
them back into the Plexus before it has happened in order to reverse
this.But as Ace says – why? Isn’t it better that the
daleks be as they are now, instead of murderous dictators?The Doctor tries to argue about all the
other things that occurred as well as the daleks heinous crimes, because of them, good things, in the original
timeline.

But there are several problems with this.Not only the obvious: that the Doctor himself has interfered so
many times it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to tell what the
original timeline would ever be anymore.Also – I find it odd in any story where there is a possibility of a
good dalek, that the Doctor is so against it, and so utterly forgetful of
the Alpha and Omega daleks in Evil
of the Daleks – the ones infected with the Human Factor, that so
clearly could have gone on to have a moral system: they were childlike,
playful proto moral beings – “why should we kill?”?Why does every dalek story subsequent to
Evil never reference the Human
Factor daleks? That story did happen, and the Doctor did not have his
memory wiped of it; just as in this
story he did not have his memory wiped of the previous timeline where the
daleks were monsters.

Anyway…he does get them back into the Plexus, and then there’s a rather
interesting cod science explanation as to how he’ll get them out again,
which makes me think – well why couldn’t you have done something similar
the first time and not blown up the star, but moving along…So he gets them
out of the Plexus once again, back to the timeline where the daleks are
horrible.And the story ends very
quickly and suddenly, with Ace feeling sad that she will never again see any
of the friends she made on Skaro – and indeed, that they will never even exist, because their planet was destroyed
a long time ago by the daleks…The Doctor expresses hope that maybe the
daleks will one day be peaceful again, as now we’ve seen that they can, of
their own choice (though it’s not been made clear how that would happen,
not even a speculation).

This end to the story was oddly unsatisfying.The story itself felt very rushed and as
if it could actually have worked very well as a novella, allowed more
scope and depth.At its current
length, the characterisations of the people and other races met on Skaro
were oddly shallow – and this does matter since the story was about
the change of character in the daleks and their way of relating to other
people: so it was needful that both daleks and those they interacted with
be clear and real feeling.The
character Tulana, for example – she came across as teenage and cross and self-righteous
and that was about it; it was the bare bones of what her character needed
to be to carry her part of the narrative; but she could have had a touch
more nuance to round her out.However, a good idea for a story –I wish at some point in the
future, Ms Blackman would be allowed to write it a bit longer; I’d read
it.ON KINDLE.)

Doctor Who: The Spear of Destiny,
by Marcus Sedgewick (BBC 50th Anniversary e-Short Story
Collection)(3rd Doctor.The
Doctor and Jo go to a museum in Piccadilly to examine part of a Norse
hoard.The Brigadier has reason to believe
a spear in the hoard is a PTN: a Physical Temporal Nexus. [Again – don’t
you love Who jargon?!!]PTN’s are
ancient, alien and of unknown origin – few exist; and the Timelords
consider them extremely dangerous. The Doctor plans to steal the spear
from the museum and replace it with a UNIT crafted replica – but when he
and Jo arrive to steal it, they are almost shot by security guards with
machine guns, proving someone knows the danger and value of the spear.

So they go back to the spear’s other known location – its original
discovery, before becoming a part of the private collection: 2nd
century AD Sweden, just before the Vernal Equinox.[I was reading this on the Vernal
Equinox- I always adore when my reading locations or timelines suddenly
coincide with the real world; I get a strange little ‘in the story’ thrill
– like this fiction is actually out there, really happening somewhere, and
I am in real time with it!].When they arrive, the Doctor gets to try out his theory that the
gods of the past are actually real historical people, mythologised –previous
kings or warriors.Thus, proving
him correct, we meet Odin, King of all Sweden, his sons Thor and Baldur,
and his people the Aesir.

How Odin comes to have the Spear - Gungnir – is a mystery. It’s a very dangerous
object, since as a PTN it can never miss its target once thrown – however impossible
– because it selects the outcome the thrower wants from all possible
outcomes in all possible universes: making the throwers wishes always come
true…and wrecking each universes own timeline many times, each time it is
used.[It’s a Back to the Future space time continuum thing; just to bring
in some outside references!]

At this point, the Master turns up, as he does tend to, as one of the
Vanir, his TARDIS disguised as a longship.After gloating a bit and setting the Aesir and Vanir almost to war
with one another, he announces the Doctor and Jo will be the sacrifices at
this evening’s Equinox ceremony.There then follows some traditional 3rd Doctor running
about and escaping, recapturing and finally saving the day, along with
switching the spear for the replica, getting away with the original, and
stranding the Master in the past by damaging his ship, as they finally
escape.

Not sure why, but this short and rather silly story felt much more
satisfying than the previous 7th Doctor one I read [back to
back].Despite being the same
length, this one felt less slight and shorthanded; more complete and neat.
Anyway, enjoyably rompish.ON
KINDLE.)

Doctor Who: A Handful of Stardust,
by Jake Arnott (Time Trips e-Short Stories)
(6th Doctor.Doctor Dee’s
Elizabethan time period; where he is given what he thinks is an incubus
[but which is actually a pleasure parasite, that accentuates his cravings-
in his case for knowledge] by a new pupil [guess who?].He swallows it and forgets about it [a
very neat little feature of the parasite].Amidst his work with his acolyte Thomas Digges, a few days later,
the Doctor and Peri are very surprised to be pulled off course to
materialise in Dee’s study.

Dee and the Doctor get on very well, falling immediately into discussion
of the Hieroglyphic Monad, an arcane symbol that seems to have been able to
send a distress call to the TARDIS and actively divert it to Dee.The Doctor believes this is all something
to do with a supernova in Cassiopeia in 1572, due to happen the next
day.He suspects “a massive
interstellar transportation portal” is under construction on Cassiopeia
[this barely counts as Who jargon, as it actually makes sense, but I am on
a roll with noticing these lovely little expressions so…].

Of course, there is something
weird going on, and it’s the Master, again.[!!!]I don’t know why, but even though The Master is one of the most
predictable and least convincing or successful of Who villains when you
think about it, I am always cheering whenever he comes on and
metaphorically twirls his moustache.I am most fond of him.After
a grapple, he steals the Doctor’s TARDIS [as his own is broken], inadvertently
kidnapping Peri and Thomas Digges.Cue subplot about Digges really rather liking Peri, and her trying
hard to be polite but not sharing his feelings.

They land in Cassiopeia, where the Master has hoodwinked the blue-skinned locals
into believing he can save them from the impending supernoval
apocalypse.In doing so, he has
created a mockery of their peaceful culture, as only some of them will be
saved – which leads to greed and an ugly fight for survival where only the
high born and monied are winning, preparing to leave the poor and ill
resourced to die.The Master has
offered them Earth to recolonize.But The Master is foiled by one of the Cassiopeians with an
increasing disgust at what the Master has done to her society, and a conscience
about ecology of otherplanets; while the Doctor, elsewhere, breaks into
the Master’s TARDIS and tampers with the settings, ensuring the
Cassiopeians will be diverted away from Earth [we don’t find out where –
all a bit Space 1999 in a way,
they will wander].

Dee and the Doctor have a fond farewell, finding similarities in their
different lives, one a magician alchemist, almost a proto scientist; one
an ever curious Timelord.As they
leave Dee and Digges behind, the Doctor shows Peri what an effect she had on
Digges, who went on to map the stars and space in an entirely new and
modern way- all due to having seen the supernova of Cassiopeia, and the
birth of new stars.

In many ways this story is quite lovely, its author clearly fascinated
with Dee and his investigations, his time period, the way it was all so on
the verge of being modern.It’s a little
short on plot – but it’s large on homage to the period; and more than a
little a hymn in praise of science itself, astronomy, ecology,
humanism.And all by implication,
except for some small quotes the Doctor makes at the very close of the
story.A very affectionate story,
perfectly suited for the Sixth Doctor, and a very spirited turn for Peri,
so often let down by her scriptwriting for the original TV episodes.Very good! ON KINDLE.)

Doctor Who: Illegal Alien,
by Mike Tucker and Robert Perry (BBC Past Doctors Series)
(This was the first part of these 2 writers' imagined season 27 for
Sylvester.It does get off to a
good start- this was a very strong cyberman story, with its WW2 background; and
its American gumshoe secondary character doing some of the narration.There’s death galore here, from the damaged
cyberman as a serial killer operating during the blackouts: as the Limehouse
Lurker; the cybermats shredding people; and most of the subsidiary characters
dying either at the hands of the cybermen or picking each other off, or
being victims of their own greed: Major Lazonby, Potter, Hartmann, and the interestingly
Machiaveliian George Limb.

I really like the style of these 2 authors – I’ve never understood how you
can write a book with another person [being highly territorial myself], do
you take turns with chapters or sit there collaborating on each sentence?
No clue.However they did it, this
novel shows they can do long forms just as well as the short story of
theirs that I really enjoyed from Short
Trips and Side Steps. They love language and playing about with the
ideas they are using, hence Colonel Schott, lying on his bunk trying to
drown out some bloodletting with Wagner: “The dignified, graceful
mellifluous tones of German civilisation could no longer drown out the
screams and roars of German barbarism.”I liked that; very neat.This book is also littered with some lovely examples of the
otherwise self-righteous taking against wrongdoing speeches that if anyone
said them but the Doctor, would come off a bit pretentious.But in his hands, and especially
imagining Sylvester in one of his more furrowed brow deliveries, sounds
properly profound: “There is always evil to be fought. Evil thrives on
neglect.It thrives on ignorance,
on apathy, on hypocrisy.It thrives
wherever we allow these things to grow unchallenged.It thrives wherever we turn our face away
from need.Wherever we close our
eyes, evil thrives.” Quite, I agree.I also think it thrives when you give people lives of undeserved privilege
so that they grow up to think there are natural stratifications in society
and they are on an upper one just because they are, of course, better; or
if you treat any people unfairly or badly and then don’t fix it or at the
least apologise and back up your actions with better ones than
before.But I’m pretty sure that's
another Doctor Who book; and the entire real world.

I liked this book a lot, and look forward to the rest of Tucker and Perry,
or Perry and Tucker’s projected season 27.It’s different to the New
Adventures in that its preserving the somewhat playful nature of the Sylvester
era alongside his darker and more strategizing moments, without becoming
so epic and angry and traumatised as to lose the ability to be a fun read
[which is why I am thus far having trouble proceeding with the latest New Adventure; though I am nothing
if not tenacious, and will move along with that series - I’m just enjoying
some of these other series’s so much more that it’s easier to move on to
them next.But I will go on.ACTUAL BOOK.)

Doctor Who: The Stones of Venice,
by Paul Magrs (Big Finish Dr Who audio plays monthlies, no.18)
(The third 8th Doctor play in an initial run of 4 for him.And finally!One I really really enjoyed!The Doctor and Charley land in Venice,
but not during Renaissance times as they were after, but in the 23rd
century, when Venice is finally about to sink into the sea and be lost
forever.This has led to a strange
sequence of events and characters.Many ‘revellers’ are there - monied partyers, who plan to pillage
and loot and be drunk on the whole once in a lifetime spectacle; cynical
old aristocrats refusing to leave; and the Gondoliers who are waiting for the
city to be returned to them [and not just because they have boats and will
survive the sinking; but because they are a different race, web-footed and
able to live under the sea].

The city itself has been under a curse these last hundred years, when the
Duke Orsino’s now dead [?!!!] wife Estella cursed the people of the city
to live unchanged all this time as she was outraged that he lost her in a
game of cards, like a horse.She then
threw herself into the canal in her wedding dress, and apparently drowned.There are death cults who worship her
and her memory, convinced that if they can find a portrait of her or her
body itself, that they could revive her and break the curse, bringing all
to rights again.[Getting a Great Expectations vibe?Estella, wedding dress, things staying
unchanged; there’s even an elderly character called Miss Lavish, who is as
batty as Miss Havisham…and whom the Duke detests, demanding at one point, “will
someone take this obstreperous old hag away??” which did set me giggling,
because people don’t say ‘obstreperous’ or ‘hag’ as often as they used to,
let alone together; indeed: the best use of the word ‘hag’ in modern times
has been Simon Pegg in HotFuzz, but that’s by the by…The Miss
Lavish/ Estella link is not tenuous and is infact massively important to
the outcome of the plot.Think
Dickens, you’ll get it.]

Initially the Doctor is very concerned about the plight of the city’s many
artworks, and spends lots of time with the curator of the Duke’s collection,
Churchwell; though when he discovers Charley has been kidnapped by Pietro,
a gondolier, he rushes off to save her.She meanwhile, has been expressing great sympathy for the plight of
the downtrodden gondoliers, and is repaid by them drugging her and using her
to impersonate Estella so as to fool the Duke, as the gondoliers WANT the
curse to be fulfilled so that they can have the city back for themselves…

The Doctor has many good lines here, lots of banter; as well as
opportunities to express his indignation, “I don’t like nastiness and
people getting away with it”.He
doesn’t believe in the curse, and is convinced something corrupt underlies
the whole Duke Orsino and Estella situation, and is especially suspicious
of the Cults [“I find cults too solemn for my tastes” he says in passing
to Churchwell]. Without spoiler-ing it too much more, I can leave the plot
there…

Interestingly, this was apparently the first story that Paul McGann
recorded for Big Finish, so long after the TV movie - and he is incredibly
assured; I enjoyed his performance so much more than the other two so far
[recorded after this one] – it just
must go to show that it’s the quality of the material, scriptwise that he
has to work with: well done Paul Magrs, this was great!Atmospheric, fun and very pacey; didn’t
droop at all - and all the characters were large and full fleshed.Charley gets spirited here also, at one
point yelling at Duke Orsino that the curse was entirely his fault, “caused
by your greed and your disregard!”After the surprise reveal near the end, there is a very
climactic finale, as melodramatic as the subject matter and setting
required.

Special word for the sound palette in this one: it’s evocative and rich.
This is a very visual script - so I’m dead impressed at how much the sounds
helped me to visualize it all in my mind. Not only the omnipresent water, clink
of revellers glasses, far off cries, but the synthy music cues and the
general mood- it was all very well done indeed, wonderfully done.Lovely use of clocks to suggest the
countdown to the sinking of Venice. Lovely piano score by Russell Stone.

It’s interesting, because this wasn’t the most dynamic of stories in many
ways, but it’s one of the best Big Finish’s I’ve heard so far in some ways
– it was full of life. It made very good use of the connotations of its
setting- its long and dubious history; its incredible romance; its already
decaying sense of nihilism.I would
recommend this one for a listen –it had the same overdone and FUN
feel as some of the gothic era of Tom Baker…ON DOWNLOAD.)

Monday, 15 September 2014

Looking at the
prevailing obsession with money, the getting and managing of it (and what
happens when you can’t pay your debts), in eighteenth century English
literature – with specific reference to female heroines in Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724); Henry Fielding’s Amelia (1751), and Fanny Burney’s Cecilia (1782).

We left Roxana last time (just to recap) having accepted a
contract of cohabitation, written up legally, from the landlord-jeweller.She had removed her competition in terms of
Amy, by causing her to be belittled in both her own and the landlord-jeweller’s
eyes (‘the bedding’ – read, the rape of Amy).We now come to what happened next – what else will Roxana do to guarantee
her own safety, materially…and emotionally, so she imagines?The landlord-jeweller does not last long now
she has learned the lesson she needed.They both decide to move on to other ‘transactions’.Roxana meets a Prince.

***

And just in case you’re a trifle lost – here are the earlier
posts in this series, which is really the world’s longest almightiest waffliest
dissertation style essay; I totally forgive you for having lost track of where
we are!

Roxana has learned that to deal with people as transactions,
preferably linked to actual cash and/or goods is a far cleaner way of relating,
for her.This lesson is honed in her
involvement with the Prince, who in terms of his financial acumen is a dinosaur.Not only does he load Roxana down with so
much portable wealth that she actually devotes quite a lot of page space to
worrying how to transport it all (settling on a rather impractical chest which
may be stolen) when they travel: “I had a terrible Difficulty upon me […] in
what manner to take Care of what I had to leave behind me; I was Rich […], very
Rich, and what to do with it, I knew not” (p.100).The trouble with her liaison with the Prince
is that while it makes her very rich indeed, it’s all portables (plate, glass,
jewels, furs etc – pp.70-2) and not money that makes money.Dijkstra presents the liaison as one which
teaches Roxana to capitalise on the area of aristocratic financial stagnancy,
saving the profits for more fruitful reinvestment.Roxana is aware that she herself could fall
out of favour with the Prince at any moment, and so must preserve her “harvest”
(p.75).She has already learned enough
to roundly criticise the Prince’s over lavish gifts and his lack of a sense of
the value of commodities – in which she includes herself, clearly:

…they raise the Value of the
Object which they pretend to pitch upon by their Fancy; I say, raise the Value
of it, at their own Expence; give vast presents for a ruinous favour, which is
so far from being equal to the Price, that nothing will, at last prove more
absurd, than the Cost Men are at to purchase their own Destruction. (p.74)

An early bank in Amsterdam, acknowledged to be the start
of the banking revolution in Europe and the beginning of
the growth of rapacious capitalism, still with us today.

The liaison with the Dutch Merchant is the height of her
learning about economic matters from a relationship; after this liaison she
will be independent of men for a while.Defoe would have been well aware that Dutch trade was the envied model
of operations in England
at the time Roxana was written: not
only did they have a fully operational banking system, but they understood all
forms of capital management and international transfer of funds[1].England had aspirations of forming
a similar banking system, and the incident that leads to Roxana’s involvement
with the Dutch merchant serves to emphasize why ‘paperwealth’ is preferable to
portable wealth.For someone who values
her privacy as Roxana learns to, the lesson is worth remembering[2].The complicated incident of saving her jewels
from someone who is trying to pretend she stole them so he can keep them for
himself teaches her much about both discretion, and the vulnerability of those
who carry hard assets about with them.Considering how much more portable wealth she has after her relationship
with the Price, it is vital that she learns the lessons of ‘bills of exchange’
– to be able to convert her cumbersome actual wealth to symbolic and clean
(non-traceable and non-accountable) bills.It is not until she spends her year in Holland, learning the financial system, that
she begins to refer to herself as a “woman of business”, a “she-merchant”
(p.131).She resists the temptation to
form a partnership with the Dutch merchant, arguing in a twenty-paged debate
against marriage for herself, which Dijkstra notes is “in effect as if we are
witnessing two merchants trying to outwit each other in a context of commercial
rivalry” (p.26).

Beth Swan sees Roxana’s insistence on not marrying at this
point as part of an “ongoing critique of law with reference to financial matter
in fiction”, that she sees running through the literature of the whole century[3].She argues that Defoe’s contemporary readers
would have well understood issues like settlement laws, maintenance of
children, dower and jointure.I concur
with her view (I’ll show it with Amelia’s
entanglement’s with debtor’s prison; and Cecilia’s
plaguey inheritance).Without an
understanding of the basics of the law that stands like that sword of Damocles
over the heads of Roxana’s children at the start of the book; and later, the
disposal of income commensurate with a normal marriage contract, one cannot
fully appreciate Roxana’s determination not to marry.She knows that in her society marriage is
largely “a matter of cost-benefit analysis” – as even the merchant’s arguments
about inheritance imply (p.151) – and that the arrangements have little to do
with any law but economics[4].

Roxana’s period in England is marked by her platonic
association with real-life scion of progressive English capitalism, Sir Robert
Clayton.He teaches her how to invest
and accumulate, in advice that exactly anticipates advice Defoe later provides
in A Plan of English Commerce (1927)
and The Compleat English Tradesman (1728).Following his advice to stay on the same path
that made her rich (not that he is actually aware of the details), she
continues her “depredations on the aristocracy”[5]
that worked on the Prince so well.This
time she snares a King. After this foray, and later a Lord, she decides she
needs to retire, referring to herself as “an old Piece of Plate […] tarnished
and discolour’d” (p.82).Her realistic
assessment of herself as a created commodity with a shifting market value, and
her awareness of its true current earning abilities, has been commented on by
several feminist critics, such as Sandra Sherman:

As a whore, a commodity, she
expands her wealth fabulously. Tutored
by England’s
foremost financier [Sir Robert Clayton] Roxana becomes a construction of the
market […] emerging as a site in which Defoe configures the discourse of the
market through a woman’s capacity to sustain open-ended narrative.[6]

This painting of Sir Robert Clayton by Gainsborough in 1769, when he had just ascended to his Baronetcy.

However, in contrast to the connection Sherman makes between Roxana’s economics and
her gender, Paula Backscheider sees Roxana’s use of the market as
quintessentially male.She pays men in
sex sometimes “because she had rather part with her body than her money” – which
is more valuable to her, as it represents that part of herself and her
circumstances which she can keep firmly in her control[7].

Despite her great wealth she still feels insecure, and
begins to hanker after titles: an even greater form of material security, in
the form of respect and respectability.Her Dutch merchant reappears and cleverly offers her two titles, one in England and one in Holland, both of which can be bought – saving
her from the need to marry into aristocratic blood.She sees, after this scheme has worked well,
that it may now be time to marry again, as she now has enough wealth to even be
able to give some up if necessary.Though she has a genuine affection for the merchant, she has been
determined to wait to marry until in a position of financial strength (another
bit of advice urged in Defoe’s Compleat
English Tradesman).She comments to
herself that if she had allowed herself to marry earlier, “I shou’d not have
been half so rich” (p.243).

Critics have been in disagreement over what the many
enumerations of Roxana’s wealth signify for her character within the text.For Dijkstra, who argues that Defoe’s
presentation of the couple’s accounts to each other manifests the “true climax”
to the novel, it is a way of ignoring the emotional side of her personality –
and the consequences this part of her identity suffers by the close of the
book.Hence his eliding of the true
ending of the novel; it does not fit with his reading of events[8].Mona Scheuermann too views the counting of wealth
as “among the most joyous [sections] in the book”; however, whilst she
acknowledges the able businesswoman in Roxana, she does not pretend to ignore
the cost to Roxana of these many calculations[9].It has been suggested that Roxana hides her
true self – whatever that may actually be seen to be – behind the transactions and her enumerations of her wealth.For example, Madeleine Kahn argues that her
‘disguises’ (the whole ‘Roxana’ identity, when her real name is Susan, as is
her daughter’s) and her quest for goods are “act[ing] out this fantasy of the
free self in her quest for money”[10].This is allied with a parallel disregard and
denial of her now grown up daughter, who is catching up with her and will spell
the end of her compartmentalization of herself.No longer will she be able to juggle the woman, the wife, the whore, the
businesswoman – and “use all of these as a shield against the role of mother”
which she gave up at the start of her financial disasters[11].

Influential feminist reading of Roxana - yet to me, incomplete in its portrayal of her

However, it is at this late stage of the book that she
undergoes a sea change of attitude.Though she has already begun to experience (intermittently) a paralysing
guilt about the source of her wealth (as discussed earlier in these posts: her
“secret Hell within”, p.260), it is not until the pursuit by Susan that she
begins to crack under the strain.Her
daughter has been searching for her ever more assiduously, and unlike her other
children who have been fobbed off with presents and gifts of security, Susan is
determined to have her real mother in the flesh.Paradoxically, although Roxana entered
prostitution in the first place to ensure that her remaining children had some
money coming to them and were well provided for, she has been content to view them
from a distance – but the child is set on exposing her.Since Roxana’s financial framework now
includes a desperate desire for quiet respectability, she is terrified by this
child’s demands – demands that threaten her “Secret History” (p.317).Thus, her quest for material well-being has
become circular.That is, her movement
from poverty to riches may have involved a gradual but marked expansion in her
horizons – an expansion quantified in terms of large houses, elaborate foods,
expensive trinkets/baubles, and finally, titled friends and gaining a title
herself.Nevertheless, towards the end
of the book, Roxana is so fearful of discovery by Susan, that to avoid
detection she becomes almost reclusive.A victim of her own renown, she hides in confinement from “that
vexatious Creature, my girl” (p.316).

Thus, towards the end of the book, her life closes her in,
no longer bringing her independence from poverty or the snares of others; or
any kind of happiness – the child threatens to take from her any kind of
security she spent her whole adult life accumulating.James R. Sutherland postulates a persuasive
idea: that all of Roxana’s actions and
reactions in this book are pure economics – all must be paid for; there is
no free lunch.That Roxana’s retribution
at the hands of Susan is all part of the ‘deal’ she must have known she was
making with Providence when she first entered a life of crime, a breaking of
the norms of her society by her chosen profession – be that as whore or businesswoman in a man’s world[12].He argues that towards the end Roxana becomes a novel of
retribution.This is backed by the text
itself, with the limp and poignant last paragraph including the lines: “I was
brought so low again that my Repentance seem’d only the Consequence of my
Misery, as my Misery was of my crime.”Not only does Roxana’s lifestyle need to be paid for, but it appears
that Amy may well have murdered Susan for Roxana’s sake.Ironically, Roxana entered prostitution to
protect her children’s security, and
ends up an accessory to murder of her own child to protect her own.

In this way, Roxana is almost entirely defined and framed by
her
need for financial security, leading to her pathological need for privacy,
causing the fear of exposure by her daughter – thus her destiny has been shaped
by herself from the first to last pages of the book.She has always mistaken monetary security for
psychological security.The punishment
(harsh) for this is that she loses all the security she gained: “I fell into a
dreadful course of Calamities, and Amy also, the very Reverse of our former
Good Days” (pp.329-330).

Maxamilian Novak – a staunch disapprover of Roxana’s moral
choices – believes that her predicament is the just consequence of her moral
decline; that she has done nothing but compromise after her initial foray into
prostitution[13].However, Novak’s reading fails to recognise
the power of Roxana’s financial imperatives.Her upbringing has made her so fixated on financial matters and their
importance to her that virtually any happening of importance in the book – and
many of little import at all – are couched within the vernacular of banking or
law. Here are three examples out of a huge number of possible instances.

When the Dutch merchant does not insist on their marriage
immediately, when he and Roxana meet again in the second half of the book, she
expresses her relief in a purely monetary way, ever mindful of obligation and
balance, and how debt can be paid:

…Opportunity to discharge the
only Obligation that endanger’d me, […] I hop’d he was satisfied I had paid the
Debt, by offering myself to be chain’d; but was infinitely Debtor to him
another way, for letting me remain free. (p.225)

Indeed, Roxana’s motivations and justifications are ALWAYS
couched in financial terms.Thus when
she decided to give a gift to her friend, the Quaker, on her marriage to the
Dutch merchant, she does so, but first complains the allowance they settle on
her is “a little too much” (despite her own personal riches! [p.250]). She then
decides to give the Quaker and Amy some of her plate – but only because she is
worried her husband might think she had suspiciously too much…

…he might be apt to wonder what
Occasion I cou’d ever have for so much, and for Plate of such a kind too; […]
as cost a hundred and twenty pound […] what I gave the Quaker was worth above
sixty Pounds […] and yet I had a great deal left for my Husband. (p.254)

Finally, when near the end of the book, she quarrels with
Any and sends her away, what she notices foremost is not the lack of her
friend; but the absence of her book-keeper: “I had lost my Right-Hand; she was
my Steward; […] did all my Business, and without her, indeed, I knew not how to go away” (p.318).These kinds of examples are telling: they
show someone in whom normal human relationships have been almost entirely
eroded by an obsession with acquiring (and holding onto) money.

There has been a dual focus at the core of Roxana all the
way through the book.It is undeniable
that there are jaunty passages, where Roxana seems very happy with all she has
accumulated and achieved.Critics like
Dijkstra, and to a lesser degree the feminist Scheuermann, take their cue from
Roxana’s positive appraisal of her life.Scheuermann makes the vital point that:

Defoe insists in both Moll Flanders and Roxana that a woman’s potential for productive work is limited only
by society’s definition of what means for earning money are available to her.
[…] She is an economically capable human being[14].

But this sunny evaluation is only half the story: the other
side of the tale is the chronicling of an obsession for acquiring security and
money – an obsession that ignores all cost to human relationships.Both Dijkstra and Scheuermann are so keen to
fit Roxana into a mold of female empowerment; they neglect to count the cost to
her of her actions.To say that Defoe conveys
the high cost of Roxana’s economic compulsion is not the same as saying Defoe
or the novel condemn her – here, I depart from the more lurid and judgemental
bias of Starr, and to an extent, even Richetti.But Defoe made clear that Roxana’s original motivation of the survival
and protection of her children slides chillingly into murdering one of them.

The ending of Roxana
is harrowing in its brevity – in one sentence, the vibrant and flamboyant
career of Roxana is over (pp.329-330): she loses everything, and is thrown into
jail for non payment of a debt, where she repents, tells her tale to a friend,
and dies, penniless but strangely harrowed or cleansed.I wouldn’t say it counts as a repentance
novel – a theme still so beloved as a motif today, and whilst much has been
made amongst certain critics of her being a Protestant and the famous line of
her being a ‘Protestant whore’, as opposed to a Catholic whore, and therefore
with less guilt, it has been implied, I think this nod to religion misses much
social historical and economic reality, by trying to steal retribution/
repentance as the main theme of the novel.

Dijkstra makes no mention of this pathetic end, a thorough
reversal of fortune for Roxana and Amy; it is left to other critics to note
that:

[…] the novel ends without
enclosing its disturbing narrative within the commonplace repentance and
prosperity theme. Her attempt at self determination can only be purchased at
the cost of social and psychological alienation[15].

Novak encapsulates the emotional element of Roxana’s
character that Dijkstra and Scheuermann have ignored, when he reminds us that
the ending of Roxana is charged “with
the kind of raw anguish that the British novel usually avoids”[16].

A Hogarth impression of debtors imprisoned in the Fleet in London, 1757. Roxana was in an Amsterdam jail, but it would have been as squalid - and more lonesome, as she had no one but a s last minute made friend to visit her as she lay dying; not surrounded by her whole family, as shown here...

The book shows both the cost of ruthless economic conquest,
and the socio-economic motivations that a woman can labour under.In the next novel I examine, Amelia, what
happens to the heroine provides a retrospective endorsement of Roxana’s
obsession with finances – as it shows what happens within a marriage of that
period if the wrong financial choices are made by the party with the most
control over them: the male.

[2] In
A Polite and Commercial People, 1727-1783,
Paul Langford comments on England’s
quest to become a ‘Paperwealth’ like Holland
– and indicates we were well on the way (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998 this
edn.), p.568.

[4] W.
Austin-Flanders, Structures of
Experience: History, Society and Personal Life in the Eighteenth Century
British Novel (Colombia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina
Press, 1984), pp. 58-59.

[9]
Mona Scheuermann, Her Bread to Earn:
Women, Money and Society from Defoe to Austen (Kentucky: University Press
of Kentucky, 1993), p.54.

[10]
Madeleine Kahn, Narrative Transvestism:
Rhetoric and Gender in the Eighteenth Century English Novel (London:
Carroll University Press, 1991), p.75.

[11]
Carol Houlihan Flynn, ‘Defoe’s Idea of Conduct: Ideological Fictions and
Fictional Reality’, in the Ideology of
Conduct: Essays in Literature and the History of Sexuality, ed. Nancy
Armstrong and Lennard Tennenhouse (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), pp.73-96
(p.87).

[16] Maximilian
Novak, ‘Defoe as an Innovator of Fictional Form’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth Century Novel, ed. John
Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, this edn. 2002), pp.41-72
(p.66).